Thought Leadership as a Marketing Concept

By Will Waugh

I spent some time reading and re-reading David Armano's post  at Logic+Emotion on how thought leadership has been reinvented.

It occured to me that you could take this from an individual level and apply it to companies that have positioned themselves as thought leaders. One company, ANA member SAS Institute has done this effectively in the B2B space. A website that they sponsor called Better Management hosts an array of intellectual capital and business solutions for executives. In this realm, they clearly utilize content as a killer app.

Points from the Logic+Emotion post which apply to SAS's thought leadership positioning:

• Thought leadership can now come from anywhere.
• If we can't schmooze at events -- we will schmooze virtually.
• Our relationships will be formed purely out of merit—from what we have to offer and what we are willing to share.

The third point is key. Companies that are willing to offer up a "peek inside" while at the same time sharing valuable information (in many cases, milllions of dollars in R&D) will rule the online arena of thought leadership.

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